Office Space

Slacking on from work can be quite dull sometimes as well, so let me regale you with tales of how this very American office is to me in this very Chinese city:

- There is a young analyst here named Nina who just this past week has diligently strived to speak only Engish in the office. This is quite a daunting task, as even now all the sounds emanating from the surrounding cubicles are in Mandarin or Shanghainese. This wouldn’t be anything worth noting except for the the fact that Nina speaks English like a robot. She enunciates with extreme fervor, and does it in such a monotonous drone that I want to turn her around like Vicky the Robot from “Small Wonder” and unscrew her back panel and jiggle around some wires. I half expect to see steam coming from her ears as she malfunctions and knocks down all the cube walls by rocking side to side along the corridor.

“I need Energon cubes!

- One of the more meaningless requirements of my job is that I am an approver of requests from engineers to buy stuff. There’s a fancy SAP system in which these requests get filtered to me, and they don’t move up the corporate approval ladder until I give it the green light. It’s this process that I consider my own personal fiefdom, and as such I’ve added so many stipulations and requirements to each request that the engineers are probably dizzy with repression (which is OK, since we’re in China and all). One of said requirements is an excel form that I created and have mandated them to fill out and attach to each request; sometimes, a straggler or newcomer will fail to do so, in which case I ignore their request until they come knock knock knocking upon my door. Accordingly, I tell them how critical it is that I get the form from them, and when they oblige and send it to me via e-mail, I stash it away without looking at it and then wait a few days more before I finally approve their request. This is called “abuse of privilege” in whatever country you go to, and I love it. This is why you should never buy my company’s stock when I am part of its payroll…unless it is severance payroll.

- One day I was walking to lunch and did a double take as I saw the name tag on someone’s cubicle: Pinocchio Wang. That had to have ranked amongst the top few weirdo names that I’ve run into here in Shanghai. When Judy taught English she mentioned to me that one of her students named herself “morethanzero,” which today remains #1 (#2 is some dude who named himself “Heather”). I ended up teaching a class in which Pinocchio enrolled, and I got to speak to him for a little bit. I have to say, the guy is full of shit.

- People who work here are generally very diligent and polite, and they often compliment me on how good my Chinese is. It’s either that, or how good my English is. That’s a frightening thought, since the only things I speak are a very rare French dialect based out of the eastern mountainous region of Belgium, as well as pig latin. In actfa, eryva ellwa.

- It is my observation that the false rumor mill here is quite vicious. Very recently, it got back to me that my reputation around the office was that of a philandering, egoistical, predatory, callous, narcissistic waste of a piece of flesh. And that was the first accurate rumor I had heard all year.